iTech

Y-Pi Movement: Building a CONNECTION for Student’s Learning

We the Senior HighSchool Students of Saint James Academy created a petition to have a Wi-Fi connection for all the students who are studying in the institution. The question is, Why did we push through this petition? Kindly read the article below to know why did we came up with this petition.

Most of us, at one point or another, have been frustrated or angry to point of wanting to take action. One of the most efficient approach is to pioneer a petition. This petition aims to escalate student’s knowledge by providing school Wi-Fi and access to it. Internet is now a basic necessity of education and having a Wifi is like having one of the essentials at board. We are aware there are no Wi-fi connections in some of schools and that pupils are not being given access to this absolutely essential learning tool. While we fully understand student’s safety is paramount, we have to get to grips with using wi-fi technology in order to help us, students, to use the internet constructively for educational purposes. Increasingly, it seems that almost the only place students can’t access the internet is in schools, when schools are the very place where young people can be taught the skills to navigate the internet safely and responsibly.

Our mission is to have an open Wifi connection all over the school campus for the sole purpose of education.

We conceit our institution as a school accepting technology as part of holistic learning and as a school preparing students on their well-discussed paths directing them into success and greatness.

Is one of your Dream to Travel Around the World?

Here are Trivias that can broaden your Knowledge in using a phone in an airplane while on a trip.

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Invetions, Inventions, INVENTIONS!!!

One of these is the 3D Printer. Let me show you how it works!!!

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Want to ORGENIZED Your PROJECTS? Use TRELLO, An Organizing Tool

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A Brief History of Facebook

Mark Zuckerberg, 23, founded Facebook while studying psychology at Harvard University. A keen computer programmer, Mr Zuckerberg had already developed a number of social-networking websites for fellow students, including Coursematch, which allowed users to view people taking their degree, and Facemash, where you could rate people’s attractiveness.

In February 2004 Mr Zuckerberg launched “The facebook”, as it was originally known; the name taken from the sheets of paper distributed to freshmen, profiling students and staff. Within 24 hours, 1,200 Harvard students had signed up, and after one month, over half of the undergraduate population had a profile.

The network was promptly extended to other Boston universities, the Ivy League and eventually all US universities. It became Facebook.com in August 2005 after the address was purchased for $200,000. US high schools could sign up from September 2005, then it began to spread worldwide, reaching UK universities the following month.

As of September 2006, the network was extended beyond educational institutions to anyone with a registered email address. The site remains free to join, and makes a profit through advertising revenue. Yahoo and Google are among companies which have expressed interest in a buy-out, with rumoured figures of around $2bn (£975m) being discussed. Mr Zuckerberg has so far refused to sell.

The site’s features have continued to develop during 2007. Users can now give gifts to friends, post free classified advertisements and even develop their own applications - graffiti and Scrabble are particularly popular.

This month the company announced that the number of registered users had reached 30 million, making it the largest social-networking site with an education focus.

Earlier in the year there were rumours that Prince William had registered, but it was later revealed to be a mere impostor. The MP David Miliband, the radio DJ Jo Whiley, the actor Orlando Bloom, the artist Tracey Emin and the founder of Wikipedia, Jimmy Wales, are among confirmed high-profile members.

This month officials banned a flash-mob-style water fight in Hyde Park, organised through Facebook, due to public safety fears. And there was further controversy at Oxford as students became aware that university authorities were checking their Facebook profiles.

The legal case against Facebook dates back to September 2004, when Divya Narendra, and the brothers Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, who founded the social-networking site ConnectU, accused Mr Zuckerberg of copying their ideas and coding. Mr Zuckerberg had worked as a computer programmer for them when they were all at Harvard before Facebook was created.

The case was dismissed due to a technicality in March 2007 but without a ruling.

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History of the Internet

The history of the Internet begins with the development of electronic computers in the 1950s. Initial concepts of packet networking originated in several computer science laboratories in the United States, United Kingdom, and France. The US Department of Defense awarded contracts as early as the 1960s for packet network systems, including the development of the ARPANET. The first message was sent over the ARPANET from computer science Professor Leonard Kleinrock’s laboratory at University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) to the second network node at Stanford Research Institute (SRI).

Packet switching networks such as ARPANET, NPL network, CYCLADES, Merit Network, Tymnet, and Telenet, were developed in the late 1960s and early 1970s using a variety of communications protocols. Donald Davies first designed a packet-switched network at the National Physics Laboratory in the UK, which became a testbed for UK research for almost two decades. The ARPANET project led to the development of protocols for internetworking, in which multiple separate networks could be joined into a network of networks.

Access to the ARPANET was expanded in 1981 when the National Science Foundation (NSF) funded the Computer Science Network (CSNET). In 1982, the Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP) was introduced as the standard networking protocol on the ARPANET. In the early 1980s the NSF funded the establishment for national supercomputing centers at several universities, and provided interconnectivity in 1986 with the NSFNET project, which also created network access to the supercomputer sites in the United States from research and education organizations. Commercial Internet service providers (ISPs) began to emerge in the very late 1980s. The ARPANET was decommissioned in 1990. Limited private connections to parts of the Internet by officially commercial entities emerged in several American cities by late 1989 and 1990, and the NSFNET was decommissioned in 1995, removing the last restrictions on the use of the Internet to carry commercial traffic.

In the 1980s, research at CERN in Switzerland by British computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee resulted in the World Wide Web, linking hypertext documents into an information system, accessible from any node on the network. Since the mid-1990s, the Internet has had a revolutionary impact on culture, commerce, and technology, including the rise of near-instant communication by electronic mail, instant messaging, voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) telephone calls, two-way interactive video calls, and the World Wide Web with its discussion forums, blogs, social networking, and online shopping sites. The research and education community continues to develop and use advanced networks such as NSF’s very high speed Backbone Network Service (vBNS), Internet2, and National LambdaRail. Increasing amounts of data are transmitted at higher and higher speeds over fiber optic networks operating at 1-Gbit/s, 10-Gbit/s, or more. The Internet’s takeover of the global communication landscape was almost instant in historical terms: it only communicated 1% of the information flowing through two-way telecommunications networks in the year 1993, already 51% by 2000, and more than 97% of the telecommunicated information by 2007.Today the Internet continues to grow, driven by ever greater amounts of online information, commerce, entertainment, and social networking.

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https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=h8K49dD52WA

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Social Media: A Friend or A Foe

We’re all guilty of it—purposely posting misleading photos and statuses to portray a certain image of ourselves in the social media world.

With the rise of filters, photo apps and Photoshop, it’s hard to discriminate between what is real life and what’s intended to create a certain impression on Facebook or Instagram.

Social media has changed our world—for better and for worse. Never has it been so easy to keep in touch with family, friends and acquaintances without wasting a whole lot of time on the phone for an hour just to find out what they’ve been up to.

Instead, we can know everything about them in one click and a few minutes of scrolling—what and where they ate this weekend, who they spent time with, how they’re feeling, how big their kids are getting and even what their vacation plans may be for the holidays. “Just booked my trip to Hawaii! Mai Tais with Santa!” (Actual Facebook post from a friend of mine yesterday.)

Personally, as someone who lives 3000 miles away from my entire family and a large chunk of my childhood friends, I bow down to social media. I am able to keep in touch with everyone I’ve ever known through this revolutionary new world and I take full advantage of that.

But what bothers me is watching how completely paranoid, insecure and bat shit crazy some of my friends get over some of the social media games we’re all playing.

I watched a friend of mine obsess over one guy’s daily additions of new female friends. She managed to create an entire story in her head about what his motivations and intentions were behind this move: he’s a “flirt,” he’s “feeding his ego,” he’s playing mind games, he’s trying to make her jealous.

Truth be told, I’m pretty sure he was just accepting friend requests as they came in and not giving it a second thought.

I’ve watched other friends post cute selfies of themselves and then end up disappointed at the lack of “likes” they have gotten. Or worse yet, if someone in particular that they were hoping to impress with their cute selfie didn’t take the time to hit the “like” button.

Another friend was downright livid that someone she had a crush on was “liking” a bunch of other girl’s photos and status updates and ignoring hers.

Truth be told, it’s really sad to think about the effect social media has on all of us.

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Apple is one of the Famous Company who have launched different kinds of gadgets such as macbook and iphones. Let’s take a glimpse of its history.

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The History of Mobile Phones

The history of mobile phones, covers mobile communication devices which connect wirelessly to the public switched telephone network.

While the transmission of speech by radio has a long history, the first devices that were wireless, mobile, and also capable of connecting to the standard telephone network is much more recent. The first such devices were barely portable compared to today’s compact hand-held devices, and their use was clumsy.

Along with the process of developing more portable technology, and better interconnections system, drastic changes have taken place in both the networking of wireless communication and the prevalence of its use, with smartphones becoming common globally and a growing proportion of Internet access is now done via mobile broadband.

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HISTORY OF COMPUTER

The computer as we know it today had its beginning with a 19th century English mathematics professor name Charles Babbage. He designed the Analytical Engine and it was this design that the basic framework of the computers of today are based on.

Generally speaking, computers can be classified into three generations. Each generation lasted for a certain period of time,and each gave us either a new and improved computer or an improvement to the existing computer.

First generation: 1937 – 1946 - In 1937 the first electronic digital computer was built by Dr. John V. Atanasoff and Clifford Berry. It was called the Atanasoff-Berry Computer (ABC). In 1943 an electronic computer name the Colossus was built for the military. Other developments continued until in 1946 the first general– purpose digital computer, the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer (ENIAC) was built. It is said that this computer weighed 30 tons, and had 18,000 vacuum tubes which was used for processing. When this computer was turned on for the first time lights dim in sections of Philadelphia. Computers of this generation could only perform single task, and they had no operating system.

Second generation: 1947 – 1962 - This generation of computers used transistors instead of vacuum tubes which were more reliable. In 1951 the first computer for commercial use was introduced to the public; the Universal Automatic Computer (UNIVAC 1). In 1953 the International Business Machine (IBM) 650 and 700 series computers made their mark in the computer world. During this generation of computers over 100 computer programming languages were developed, computers had memory and operating systems. Storage media such as tape and disk were in use also were printers for output.

Third generation: 1963 - present - The invention of integrated circuit brought us the third generation of computers. With this invention computers became smaller, more powerful more reliable and they are able to run many different programs at the same time. In1980 Microsoft Disk Operating System (MS-Dos) was born and in 1981 IBM introduced the personal computer (PC) for home and office use. Three years later Apple gave us the Macintosh computer with its icon driven interface and the 90s gave us Windows operating system.

As a result of the various improvements to the development of the computer we have seen the computer being used in all areas of life. It is a very useful tool that will continue to experience new development as time passes.

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https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=pBiVyEfZVUU

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Imagine A World Without Technology

Having recently moved country, I have been relying upon my phone as my sole means of communication with the world. You can imagine my panic, therefore, when I found myself cut off from this world of social media shortly after my arrival in France. Although I was reunited with network signal after a mere week, this experience has led me to question whether our modern-day reliance on technology is becoming unhealthy.

I often forget that androids and smartphones are very much a novel invention. Writing in light of the recent release of the iphone 6, it is hard to imagine that our parents would have been considered lucky to have a fully functioning television just forty years ago. Nowadays, to the increasing detriment of traditional forms of communication, we rely on our phones for everything. Our androids act as calculators, clocks, cameras, calendars and music players, whilst traditional forms such as the letter are fast becoming a thing of the past. Similarly, our once regular trips to the high street are slowly being replaced by the wonders of online shopping, whilst the Kindle, for example, has become a popular alternative to the book. I can’t help but feel a little nostalgic about the latter especially; as a student of English Literature, there is nothing I like more than flicking through a traditional paperback book.

Additionally, I now notice more and more that the smartphone is replacing face-to-face communication. I regularly see groups of people in restaurants, for example, paying more attention to their phones than to each other. I can’t be the only person that thinks there is something inherently worrying about this; are we beginning to choose the company of technology over the company of other human beings?

Whilst I myself viewed my recent disconnection from social media negatively at first, I have to admit that I increasingly began to feel an underlying sense of relief. I was finally being forced to enjoy my own company and, dare I say it, there was something intrinsically nice about being alone.

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https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=hSsYvYI2_tY

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The Impact of Using ICT in Music

If music technology is to support teachers in their development of pupils’ musical learning, then there must be an identifiable benefit to specific areas of that learning. Teachers who are experienced in using technology describe three areas where they see particular benefits to pupils’ learning:

Musical Understanding

Composing

Performing

Musical Understanding

This is an essential aspect of musical learning within the Orders of National Curriculum 2000. It is reflected in the Attainment Targets for music, with an ‘overarching statement’ at the beginning of each Level representing the most important learning. For instance, at Level 6, the first sentence states 'Pupils identify and explore the different processes and contexts of selected musical genres and styles’. Detailed advice on how this can be translated into appropriate music planning and learning can be found at here

Teachers who have been using music technology effectively (and especially those who use keyboards with sequencers) describe how pupils can be taught to develop better musical understanding by:

Experiencing the 'whole’ music or the complete piece. Instead of simply learning the 'easy’ bass part or the 'difficult counter-melody’, pupils can play all the parts of a piece, record them into a sequencer, and gain a real understanding of how all the parts interrelate. Their understanding is therefore significantly better than if they only played one part - no matter how good their ensemble and listening skills, it is very hard in this situation to understand how everything fits together.

Understanding the genre via the sounds and rhythms / styles. If pupils are directed to explore specific sets of sounds, or particular rhythm patterns or chord sequences, they can effectively gain understanding of a genre’s most significant features. For instance, when working on Jazz style pupils can be required to select sounds from a jazz 'selection’, and use the automatic styles to create authentic backings. Significant here is the ability again to see the 'whole’ picture - by creating and working their own 'jazz band’ instruments, pupils can understand how they interrelate.

Improving the techniques of composition. Teachers are very clear that by using sequencers (either on keyboards or computers), paired pupils are able to experiment with the 'conventions, processes and procedures’ of the whole piece. This means that they understand, for instance, how the bass and guitar riffs relate to the chord sequence and the melodic lines in a way that they cannot do if they are playing one part in an acoustic, group composition.

Composing

It has long been acknowledged that the music technology can improve pupils’ compositional skills. A powerful case for the use of technology in KS3 music was made in the publication 'The Creative Dream’ by G. Odam (published by NAME in July 2000) which argued that pupils could only access the 'creative’ curriculum if they had appropriate access to ICT.

One teacher who recently moved from a relatively traditional set of classroom resources to a set-up with a clear emphasis on ICT simply said 'Composition has improved immeasurably’. This seems to be the message - pupils using ICT gain a much better awareness of structure, texture and melodic, rhythmic and harmonic patterns / devices

Performing

Pupils experience fewer 'performance nerves’ if a sequencer is used. They only have to record when they are ready to do so, rather than being expected to conform to an undifferentiated time-scale. This has to be balanced by appropriate 'live’ performing, but the confidence they gain in their 'private’ performing seems to carry across into other work as well.

Pupils work at their own pace - weaker attaining pupils have time to develop their skills and work towards more advanced parts. In more traditional performing sessions, weaker pupils only ever play the easiest parts, and do not have the opportunity to work at developing more advanced skills over a period of time.

When pupils are required to record all the parts of a piece into a sequencer, they have to listen very carefully not only to the part they are recording, but also to the parts already recorded. This seems to improve their listening skills, and they are motivated to improve their rhythmic / ensemble playing skills. Again, this needs to be experienced in a live situation to be properly embedded, but the concentrated practice they are given in these areas when working on sequencer recording does seem to be effective

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Technology as Part of Everyday Classroom Experience

The pace at which technology evolves in our modern information-driven world can seem nothing short of overwhelming. The way we communicate, interact and understand the world around us seems to change moment to moment. Very often it is young people—our students, who are the first to understand, adopt and fully exploit the vast potential that comes with new technology. As educators, we are placed in a unique position where we must try to appreciate how our students are transformed by this constant evolution, at times regulate the extent to which students engage with these tools and at least in a very rudimentary way connect with them through the use of the technology. Yet as educators, we are often hesitant or even unsure of how to integrate this ever-evolving transformative technology into the classroom. More over, we are often at a loss as to where to begin. As teachers we cannot miss this opportunity to engage our students and adopt new approaches to delivering curriculum. The integration of technology ensures that all students, no matter their abilities, strengths or needs will be able to participate in and have an active role in their academic lives. The question then becomes, how? What follows are basic approaches any teacher can use to begin the process of integrating new technological tools into their already existing practices and routines. More than explicit instructions on how to use specific technology, software, tools, or how to assess what type of technology is appropriate for a particular student, the following offers some basic ideas and approaches to adapting new tools into established programs and classrooms.

Once an educator has made the decision to regularly integrate technology into the classroom and the tools are accessible, there are several fundamental ideas to keep in mind in order to ensure the successful and meaningful incorporation of it into the classroom. From the onset, it must be stated that the use of technology in the classroom is not an end unto itself, neither is it a panacea. Using mind-mapping or text-to-speech software, ebooks or an online learning environment will not “cure” a student with behaviour issues, improve grades or teach students specific content. At least not without a sound program already in place. What technology provides is an opportunity to involve students in the learning process in innovative and exciting ways, allowing them to work with their strengths and accommodating their learning needs. When combined with good teaching practices, a flexible approach, well established routines, engaging lessons and a multifaceted approach to teaching that takes into account the strengths and needs of all students, technology allows all students to participate in rich and meaningful learning experiences and demonstrate wide-ranging forms of success. Technology should enhance and augment our sound and successfully established teaching practices.

To be successful and significant, the use of technology must become part of the everyday, regular routine in the classroom. Access to computers, interactive whiteboards and other equipment and software should not be seen as a reward or special event usage which students must earn. Instead, technology, like textbooks, pencils and manipulatives should be understood as other tools for learning. Like “traditional” tools, technology must be integrated into the everyday experience and environment. Our students must come to understand the technological tools we use in the classroom as just other tools used to understand new concepts and processes. So then, when we are discussing physical equipment it makes sense that the integration of technology into the everyday begins with the decisions we make in the placement of material when setting up the learning environment.

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ICT IN TEACHING

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